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The Midlands Prophetic League holds its annual general meeting next month, and if the agenda circulated last week is anything to go by, the question of professional representation will once again be deferred to the following year. This letter is an attempt to ensure that it is not.
I write as a practitioner with fifteen years of active reading, not as an office-holder or self-appointed spokesperson. I have no interest in creating new bureaucracy. I have considerable interest in ensuring that the League functions as the professional body it was constituted to be, rather than as a social calendar with a subscriptions committee.
What the League Was Supposed to Do
The founding documents of the Midlands Prophetic League are clear on purpose: to advance the practice of haruspicy in the region, to maintain standards among members, and to represent practitioners’ interests in dealings with external bodies. These are not aspirational flourishes. They are the reasons the membership fee exists.
In the past three years, the League has done none of these things in any meaningful way. It has organised a well-attended retreat in Shropshire — pleasant, I am told, though the catering arrangements were poorly managed — and produced a newsletter twice yearly, the most recent issue of which devoted three of its six pages to a debate about the font used on the membership certificate. Standards guidance has not been updated since 2019. The liaison with the regional food hygiene teams, promised at the 2022 AGM, has not materialised. Practitioners operating mobile units across the East Midlands continue to do so without any coordinated guidance, and the difficulties around registering a mobile reading unit legally remain entirely unaddressed at the regional level.
This is not a personal criticism of the current committee, many of whom are dedicated practitioners giving their time voluntarily. It is a structural observation. The League has drifted into being a membership organisation without a membership offer. That needs to change.
The Practical Gaps
Let me be specific, because vague calls for improvement achieve very little.
First, standards documentation. Any practitioner joining the League today receives no guidance on hygiene protocols, sourcing ethics, or client management. They are expected to absorb this from more experienced colleagues, which works until it doesn’t. The gap between a well-trained haruspex and a poorly-prepared one is visible — sometimes literally — and the League’s failure to provide baseline guidance reflects on all of us when things go wrong. The national-level resources available at sites such as this one cover the safe use of gloves and aprons in readings and sanitisation procedures for ritual tools, but regional bodies should be reinforcing and contextualising this guidance, not leaving members to find it independently.
Second, regulatory liaison. The East Midlands has seen three separate incidents in the past eighteen months in which practitioners were approached by environmental health officers, in two cases during active client sessions. In none of these cases did the League offer any follow-up support, template correspondence, or retrospective guidance. The practitioners involved managed the situations themselves, with varying degrees of success. The League exists, in part, so that they do not have to manage these situations alone. Guidance already exists on working constructively with the Food Standards Agency and on what to do when council officials visit. The League should be actively distributing this material and developing its own regional addenda.
Third, new practitioner support. The craft requires years to develop competently. The liver alone — before one considers the subsidiary indicators of spleen, gallbladder, and intestinal configuration — demands sustained study that no weekend course can adequately provide. The League has no mentorship programme, no apprenticeship register, and no structured pathway for those who have completed initial training and need guided practice. A beginner’s guide to becoming a haruspex is a reasonable starting point, but it cannot substitute for the kind of ongoing support that a functioning professional body provides.
What I Am Proposing
I am not proposing that the League transform itself overnight, nor that it take on commitments it cannot resource. I am proposing three specific actions that fall within the League’s existing mandate and could be accomplished within the current membership year.
One: appoint a Standards and Guidance Officer. This does not need to be a paid position, though modest honorarium arrangements have worked well for similar bodies. The role would be to review existing documentation, produce a short updated hygiene and sourcing guidance document, and liaise with national resources to ensure regional materials are consistent. The document need not be comprehensive. It needs to exist.
Two: establish a Regulatory Contact Protocol. When a member is approached by any regulatory body — environmental health, trading standards, local licensing — the League should have a clear procedure: initial contact form, a brief statement of support, template correspondence if needed. Most encounters of this kind do not escalate, but having nothing in place means that even minor interactions feel more precarious than they are. The absence of institutional backing is noticeable.
Three: create a mentorship register. Ask experienced members to volunteer as points of contact for newer practitioners. No formal obligation, no complicated matching process. A list of names and areas of expertise, updated annually. This is the kind of infrastructure that a body of our size can maintain without difficulty, and its absence at this stage is genuinely puzzling.
On the Question of External Perception
I am aware that some members prefer the League to maintain a low profile. The reasoning is familiar: the less attention we draw, the fewer questions we face. There is a version of this position that is prudent, and there is a version that is simply a rationalisation for doing nothing.
Haruspicy is not a private interest. It is a professional practice with real clients, real premises (or real mobile units), real supply chains, and real interactions with public bodies. The practitioners who operate within the Midlands region are subject to the same legal and regulatory environment as any other service provider. Pretending otherwise, or hoping that collective quietness will insulate us from scrutiny, is neither realistic nor fair to members who are operating in good faith and would benefit from support.
Professional visibility — of the right kind — is not a risk. It is, in the longer term, the only reliable protection we have. Bodies that are known, documented, and engaged with the regulatory environment tend to fare considerably better than those that attempt invisibility and find themselves repeatedly surprised by consequences that were entirely foreseeable.
A Request, Not a Demand
I am sending this letter to the League’s committee directly, and I am publishing it here so that members are aware it has been sent. I am not seeking to embarrass anyone. I am seeking a response, a genuine engagement with the proposals above, and a clear indication of whether the League intends to function as a professional body or continue to function as something rather more comfortable and rather less useful.
Members who share these concerns are encouraged to raise them through the League’s own channels. The AGM remains the appropriate forum. But that forum needs to be used.
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